The largest solar power plant is to be built in Ghana. This will be built by a British company. The question in my mind is ‘ is this a way to tackle climate change or not?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/dec/04/africa-largest-solar-power-plant-ghana
Every year, World Aid day is held on Dec 1. This is an opportunity for people worldwide to unite in the fight against HIV, show their support for people living with HIV and to celebrate and remember those who have died.
In the UK, around 100,000 people are currently living with HIV and globally an estimated 34 million people have HIV. This year theme was ”Getting to Zero: Zero new HIV infections, Zero deaths from AIDS-related illness, Zero discrimination. According to The Independent newspaper, in Africa two-thirds of people are living with HIV/Aids. There is still a long way top go to combat this deadly disease and make a significant drop in the people getting this virus.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/nov/29/aids-epidemic-grow-2022
Due to the poverty rates in the world, parents are being pushed to sell their children for money or gifts. These children are given work that is not suitable for them, thereby destroying their self-esteem and confidence. Some are sold into prostitution and drug dealing. This is so sad. It is most common in poor countries where the poverty rate is high. Children are the future of tomorrow. The memories of these experiences lived with them forever and never go away.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2012/nov/27/benin-poverty-child-traffickers
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/nov/27/child-workers-bolivia-unite
Is global warming and climate change the same? Do they have the same meanings? I sometimes confuse the two of them to be the same. On reading about them, i found out that global warming simply means that some parts of the world will experience erratic climate changes due to human activities. Watch the following video.
Is global warming and climate change the same? Do they have the same meanings? I sometimes confuse the two of them to be the same. On reading about them, i found out that global warming simply means that some parts of the world will experience erratic climate changes due to human activities. Watch the following video.
Gone are the days when women stay at home to take care of the family and the men bring in the money for the family. Due to urbanisation, women are now seen in the workplace. Sometimes, these women are harrassed, victimised or even exploited. Take for example, Bangdelesh. This is a country where the women are seen as a powerful economic force. It has opened the way for major issues due to this fact. http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2012/nov/05/urbanisation-bangladesh-women
”Whether Africa will ever benefit from its natural resources is a question that is more relevant now than ever, as new discoveries of coal, oil and gas across East Africa look set to transform global energy markets and – people hope – the economies of those countries.
But can the likes of Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique and Uganda really turn their newfound riches into tangible wealth for ordinary people?
This month the BBC Africa Debate team will be in Ethiopia asking just that. Politicians, business representatives, activists and academics from across the continent will be taking part, as over 800 experts gather in Addis Ababa for the Eighth African Development Forum.
“On average, resource-rich countries have done even more poorly than countries without resources,” according to Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist at the World Bank and professor of economics at Columbia University, in the United States.
There are greater economic inequalities in resource-rich countries than elsewhere – as perhaps indicated by on-going miners’ strikes in South Africa, considered one of the most unequal countries in the world – and too often there is also endemic corruption.
In Nigeria, the continent’s biggest oil producer, at least $400bn (£250bn) of oil revenue has been stolen or misspent since independence in 1960, according to estimates by former World Bank vice-president for Africa, Oby Ezekwesili. That is 12 times the country’s national budget for 2011. Meanwhile, 90% of people live on less than $2 per day.
There has been violence between Sudan and South Sudan over oil this year, and Malawi and Tanzania have yet to resolve their dispute over who owns the oil and gas in Lake Malawi.
A different story?
Ghana started producing oil in December 2010 and there is further exploration all along the West African coastline. Only five of Africa’s 54 countries are not either producing or looking for oil.
From Algeria to Angola – and from petroleum to platinum, iron ore to oceans – the scramble for Africa’s resources has often caused problems rather than created prosperity.
Meanwhile, much of the profits from resource exploitation leave the continent entirely in the hands of foreign-owned companies which pay low rates of tax.
Few African countries process their own raw materials – rather, the value is added elsewhere, to the benefit of others.
Foreign-owned resource extraction companies are often criticised for providing little in the way of local employment and contribution to local economies.
But could there be a different story?
Diamond-rich Botswana has been praised as a country doing things right, experiencing relatively stable and transparent economic growth for decades. It has also managed to retain some of the profits from processing its raw materials – something most African countries have failed to do.
A once poor European country, Norway, also proves it can be done – distributing its oil wealth so equally that it heads the United Nations Human Development Index (Nigeria comes in 156th place).
So why have so many African countries failed to turn natural riches into benefits for the masses? Who is to blame for the foreign exploitation, and whose responsibility is it to put things right? What about possible solutions – renegotiation of contracts, better transparency mechanisms, higher taxation, resource nationalism? Should the likes of Mozambique and Ghana be celebrating their resource discoveries – and what do they need to do to make the most of them? Will Africa ever benefit from its natural riches?”
hello. I read the below article and decided to post it. I thought it very interesting to see what other countries of the world think about women’s empowerment:
As the alternative Aids summit in Kolkata has shown, society should start treating women who work in the industry with respect instead of disgust. When the multi-country research programme that I direct, Pathways of Women’s Empowerment began its search for inspiring examples of empowerment, in 2006, few might have imagined it would take us to a collective of sex workers in a town in the heart of Maharashtra in India. But the stories of empowerment I heard when I visited the Sangli headquarters of the Vamp collectivenot only summed up some of the most important lessons we were learning in the programme about what works to support women’s empowerment, they were also among the most impressive.
“If I’d been married, I would have been HIV positive by now,” says one of Vamp’s stalwarts, Shabana, reflecting that married women are far more vulnerable than she is as a sex worker, unable to insist on condoms with their husbands as she does with her clients. And her face breaks into a smile as she describes the life she leads: the freedoms she enjoys, her choice of clients, and the autonomy and empowerment she has. “I’m as free as a bird,” she says.
It is all too often assumed that disempowerment leads women to sell sexual services – as a last resort, as the ultimate step before destitution, and out of coercion rather than choice. The sex workers I met in Sangli, however, made it quite clear that being in business – they refer to their work as dhanda, meaning business – was not something they did out of desperation.
Some had been married and returned to sex work full of pity for those women who had to put up with the privations and lack of freedom marriage brings. Some had tried other jobs, and found them tiring, exploitative and badly paid, echoing the findings of the first pan-India survey of sex workers. Sex work was, for them, an occupation they spoke of with pride, despite the stigma. And, they say, this is where the problem lies: with the societal attitudes towards them, and the violence, stigma and abuse of human rights they experience as a result.
Vamp’s mission is to change society. Rather than treating sex workers as victims to be rescued or rehabilitated, it demonstrates the power of collective action as a force for women’s empowerment, mobilising sex workers to improve their working conditions, and claim rights and recognition. And they’re yielding results.
Founded in 1997, Vamp now has more than 5,000 members. Weekly meetings bring the collective together to tackle a wide range of issues faced by members. Health work and advocacy for sex workers’ human rights are interwoven with Vamp’s everyday work in the densely populated alleyways in the red-light districts of Sangli and other towns in the region.
The collective’s work includes HIV prevention with those who sell and buy sex – not only sex workers but housewives who engage in clandestine sex work, men who have sex with men, sex workers’ clients and lovers, and truck drivers whose routes crisscross the state. Vamp works with doctors, the police and the local authorities to combat stigma and violence, offering support and care to people with HIV and orphaned children, and fighting for workers and their families to be treated with dignity.
Recognised locally for its members’ feisty response to the violence and abuse meted out to sex workers on a daily basis, and internationally for the model that its approach to HIV prevention and trafficking has become, Vamp has become a shining example of the power of organisation. Vamp members don’t want to be “saved” by foreign organisations; they want to be respected as human beings. To see them as “prostituted women” is to treat them as not fully human, incapable of determining their own destinies or, indeed, of working together to claim justice. It’s precisely that kind of attitude that perpetuates the abuse sex workers experience.
It’s time that the toxic mist of pity, disgust and moral opprobrium that swirls around the figure of the sex worker was replaced by a willingness to put prejudice aside and listen to and learn from women like Shabana and her colleagues. There are some surprises in store for those who do.
diwuoha1 